Today is a Different War is a striking portrayal of life from inside war-torn Ukraine. The voices assembled here veer from the frightened and disoriented. No other volume of poems captures the duality of fear and bravery, anger and love, despair and hope, as well as the numbness and deep feeling of what it means to be Ukrainian in these unthinkable times. If you want to know what’s in the heart of the Ukrainian people, look no further than this stunning volume of poems: “so this is it. now it’s you who chooses how to live your life.” Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian. In 2022 her joint volume with the poet Boris Khersonsky, her husband, came out in English translation from Lost Horse Press, titled The Country where Everyone’s Name is Fear. Khersonska was recently included in the list, “33 International Women Writers Who are Bold for Change” by Words without Borders. Olga Livshin’s poetry and translations appear in The New York Times, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is the author of A Life Replaced: Poems with Translations from Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Gandelsman. Livshin is a co-translator of A Man Only Needs a Room, a volume of Vladimir Gandelsman’s poetry.

Renowned author
 Lawrence Goldstone
will read from and discuss his critically acclaimed book
NOT WHITE ENOUGH:
The Long, Shameful Road to
Japanese American Internment

 Saturday, April 29 at 7 PM

Lawrence Goldstone’s Not White Enough is a comprehensive examination of a century of bigotry against Chinese and Japanese Americans that culminated in the infamous Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. United States: the landmark ruling that upheld the illegal imprisonment of more than 100,000 innocent men, women, and children who were falsely accused of endangering national security during World War II. This book is the first to trace the full arc of prejudice against Asian Americans that made internment inevitable and serves as a legal and political history of anti-Asian racism, beginning with the California gold rush and ending with Korematsu.  Goldstone examines each of the key Supreme Court decisions—including Wong Kim Ark, Ozawa, and Thind—as not simply jurisprudence but as expressions of political will. He chronicles the political history of racism that made Japanese internment almost inevitable, highlighting the key roles San Francisco mayors James D. Phelan and Eugene Schmitz, political boss Abe Ruef, California Attorney General Ulysses Webb, and future Chief Justice Earl Warren played in instigating some of the most egregious anti-Asian legislation, all for political convenience and gain. Goldstone also illustrates Chinese and Japanese immigrants’ courage and determination to carve out a place for themselves in a country that did everything it could to reject them.

Lawrence Goldstone is the author or co-author of more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies; Dark Bargain: Slavery, Profits, and the Struggle for the Constitution; The Activist: John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, and the Myth of Judicial Review; Inherently Unequal: The Betrayal of Equal Rights by the Supreme Court, 1865–1903 and On Account of Race: The Supreme Court, White Supremacy, and the Ravaging of African American Voting Rights. His work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Toronto Star, Salon, and Slate, among others. 

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“Lawrence Goldstone’s book, both lively and well-documented, shows us that the shocking mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II did not come out of thin air; it was based on a century of growing anti-Asian racism. He also celebrates people we remember too seldom: the heroic figures who fought to undo this great crime.”—Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis